


Number One Fan

by sheepyshavings



Category: Killing Eve (TV 2018)
Genre: Angst!, F/F, alcohol abuse!, definite pining, it's dark like the show but hopefully some humor??, let me love eve unabashedly!
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-06-30
Updated: 2019-06-30
Packaged: 2020-05-31 07:38:51
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,483
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/19421467
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/sheepyshavings/pseuds/sheepyshavings
Summary: Eve drinks a lot of wine after stabbing Villanelle.Villanelle comes to her first while she’s dreaming.(or, Eve partakes in unhealthy coping mechanisms after she comes home from Paris. Villanelle can't seem to leave her alone.) Somewhat of a character study on Eve.





	Number One Fan

**Author's Note:**

> Wowie this is the first time I've written for Killing Eve but I've had the notes for this one for a while! It's a gift to my Killing Eve Pride Month buddy, priisakilljoy on tumblr. But really, I also wanted an excuse to go into Eve's brain because she is the best character on TV this decade, fight me.
> 
> Title and theme based on Number One Fan by MUNA, a rad queer lady band you should definitely check out.

She arrives home from Paris, blood still caked under her fingers like a disease. The house is empty, Niko’s voicemails and notes spread over the table ignored as Eve reaches for the cupboard above the stove. The shelves are nearly empty. She reaches in blindly, finding the neck of some unknown bottle of wine, pulls it greedily from its spot among the London Dry Gin and unopened Svedka. The cork rips as she pries it off, bits falling into the liquid underneath. Eve doesn’t notice, taking a cautious sniff to assess how long it’s been open.

She discovers Niko has snatched the wine glasses from their place above the stovetop. When she looks around more, she notices half the cutlery has disappeared as well, along with a portion of the plates and bowls. She thinks she might cry, but when her breath hitches and her mouth opens, a barking laugh emerges instead. Eve feels her shoulders shake as she sucks in a deep breath, tears forming in the corners of her eyes as she laughs, and laughs, and laughs.

She brings the wine bottle to her lips and tilts it back. It hasn’t gone off yet, and it burns when she swallows too much at once, the gentle chuckle in her throat turning into a cough as she tries to cover her mouth. A trickle of wine slips down her fingers, converging under her nails with the blood. Eve stares and rubs her fingers together, smearing the flakes over her fingertips. She slowly brings her hand away from her face and wipes it on the hem of her shirt.

She brings the bottle over to the couch in the living room and lays back, pulse pounding like thunder as she drinks again.

\--

Eve drinks a lot of wine after stabbing Villanelle. The image plays in her mind over and over again like a tape stuck on repeat. The unexpected stickiness, the hot, wet feeling against the heaviness of the blade, the way Villanelle trembled underneath her. She thinks, after buying the first three bottles, that liquor would be a more cost-effective way to get shit faced enough to forget digging a knife into someone, but there’s something about wine that makes it seems classy enough to cover the fact that she’s partaking in unhealthy coping mechanisms.

She shows up for work two days after returning to London, put together impeccably, and Carolyn only asks minor questions before setting her free into her office. Kenny and Elena greet her a little too cheerfully. Eve slumps into her chair and shoves her briefcase under the desk, returning their welcomes with as much gusto as she can muster. A headache haunts the edge of her mind, and she throws back two paracetamol before steeling herself for the day ahead.

\--

Villanelle comes to her first while she’s dreaming. Eve falls asleep that night, her head spinning and her mouth stained deep red. The bed is too big, too empty, and she finds her arms reaching out to look for someone that isn’t there. But slumber finds her easily, helped by the drink, helped by the exhaustion, and before she even has the time to wonder why her fingers keep curling around nothing, Eve drifts off. The last thing she sees before her eyes are pulled closed by a wave of dizziness is a splatter of blood across her palm.

Eve is alone in the dream, at least at first. She recognizes the stairwell from Paris, how the steps wind up and to the left, the paint chipping off in the corners of the stone. The doorways at the top are tall, elegant, and she moves up toward them.

“You couldn’t stay away very long, could you?”

Eve freezes in place. She instinctively backs up against the wall, like that will somehow help, like it’s the most logical thing to do. She tilts her head up and sees Villanelle sitting at the top of the stairs. Her face is still bruised, hair falling out of place in a frazzled way that Eve can’t quite match up with the image of the woman in her head. Eve’s eyes lower to the wound on her stomach, a crater impact leaving an aura of red and brown to stain the area. The blood seems to pulse and ooze as Eve swallows hard. When she inhales, the air smells metallic.

“Are you dead?”

Villanelle breaks into a grin. There’s a trickle of blood that spills from her nose onto her teeth. As she stands up, her stomach pulses again and the stain on her shirt grows like it’s alive. It glistens in the light creeping in from the outside, and Eve finally tears her eyes away.

“You can’t kill me that easily, Eve Polastri.” Villanelle spits red onto the granite floor. “But you did a pretty damn good job.”

Eve feels something wet on her hands. “Are you going to kill me?”

Villanelle laughs. She takes a step, then another, down the staircase until she hovers above Eve. Close up, the blood looks so fresh, almost alive. It’s inches from her eyes and she can’t look away.

“I should, after what you did.” Villanelle takes the hand that had been hovering over her stomach and reaches out to cup Eve’s cheek. This close, she can feel the heat radiating off the wound, the metallic smell filling her mind like tendrils of smoke. Villanelle’s hand is sticky, sickly damp and rough. She leans down and brushes her lips against Eve’s ear. Eve closes her eyes and tries to take a step back only to find her feet are stuck to the ground.

“Maybe when I find you again.” Villanelle’s voice is so soft it almost gets lost among the sensations hammering away at Eve. “But not right now.”

Eve feels her throat swell shut as she tries to find the words among the chaos circling around in her mind. But all she can hear is the thud of her heart, the thud of the pulse against Villanelle’s stomach, spilling and spilling blood until it begins to swell over the hem of her shirt and trail down her leg.

Eve wakes up with a cry leaping from her throat and into the sweat-soaked pillow. She immediately groans, bringing a hand to her forehead and pressing as hard as she can. Her vision slides in and out of focus as she reads the clock on the bedside table, red numbers obscured by the halos that burst around them.

She stumbles into the bathroom, sickness slipping out of her as she curls herself around the toilet. It hurts to move, the air as sharp as glass as she tries to bring her breathing down. Her hair is plastered to her forehead in clumps, and her whole body shakes until nothing more comes up. She bends inward, waiting for the pounding in her head to subside enough to move again.

When she can stand up, she blindly reaches through the bathroom cabinet until she finds the nail brush Niko had graciously left behind. She sits on the edge of the tub, scrubbing her fingers until they’re raw and the sun edges between the cracks in the curtains.

\--

The problem is easy to ignore, and she’s very good at portioning her life into little boxes: Eve, who goes out sober to get things done; Eve, who shows up dutifully to work and smiles when Carolyn plainly ignores the bags under her eyes and hands her a new case file instead; Eve, who no longer tastes anything when she necks the bottle; Eve, who speaks to Villanelle in dreams but still has no answers. Villanelle never touches her again, always lingering just out of reach.

The location in the dreams is always different. Sometimes it’s familiar, a subway platform in Berlin, trains screeching along the metal tracks as Villanelle stands opposite, disappearing when the train departs. Sometimes Eve doesn’t know where they are, searching the skyline of some unknown city to find a building she recognizes. She wonders if it’s even somewhere real. The only constant is Villanelle, decked out in some ridiculous outfit, blood splattered across her front and marring the delicate fabrics as she banters with Eve. Over time, the wound grows smaller, and smaller, until Eve forgets exactly where she stabbed Villanelle and what the chasm looks like fresh. Looking down at her hands, they’re no longer dusted in someone else’s blood. Villanelle smiles at her when she does this. Approval, pride, something else?

\--

One night, Eve looks up from her evening bottle of wine and sees Villanelle in her bed, legs crossed at the ankle. Eve rubs a hand over her forehead.

“You’re not really here.” It’s said plainly, and Eve knows it’s true, even though she can see the rise and fall of Villanelle’s chest and the way the bed sinks in under her weight.

Villanelle raises her eyebrows. “Oh, good, I’ll guess I’ll just see myself out.” Eve can see her speaking through a smile. She doesn’t hide it. She never has.

Eve had given up on trying to find wine glasses ages ago. She grabs the 2017 cabernet by the neck before tipping it up. Her taste buds are already numb, and she only feels the dryness swelling in her mouth.

This not-Villanelle crosses and uncrosses her legs.

“Why don’t you see yourself out then?” Eve only half-means it, the fuzz slowly beginning to creep into her head. It’s jarring, seeing Villanelle while she’s awake. She wants to get up and go over, press a hand to the stomach there, clothed and wound-free. Would it still be warm? Would the skin still jump up at the touch?

She wants to escape the room, flee downstairs where Villanelle will be gone and cat-like eyes can’t taunt her endlessly with unspoken words.

Eve wipes away a dribble of wine that threatens to fall from her chin and onto the white cushion below her. When she looks up again, the bed is empty. She stares at the sheets for a few minutes before closing her eyes and lying back in the chair.

\--

Next time Villanelle appears, Eve isn’t at home. She’s pushing a trolley with a rickety wheel through the bustling crowds of Tesco on a Saturday afternoon. _Clack, clack, clack_. She turns the corner into the aisle with the biscuits and Villanelle is standing there in an entirely gold-tinted ensemble, tipping the packets of Jaffa Cakes off the shelf. They land on the off-white tiles with a _fwump_ , crushing the insides.

“Really?” Eve deadpans.

Villanelle purses her lips and rips one of the packages open, shoving an entire Jaffa Cake in her mouth. Crumbs fall among the mess on the floor. She shrugs, cheeks swollen like a chipmunk.

Even steers the trolley around the spillage and ignores the unsavory sounds of Villanelle chewing too loudly behind her.

“You should probably stop buying so much wine,” the muffled voice says. Eve hears the clatter of heels follow her into the spirits section. Another mouthful of biscuit. “You’re going to ruin your liver. Besides-” Eve hears the dramatic pause and the chewing stops. “-you get all sloppy and sad when you’re drunk.”

Eve slows the trolley and sighs. She looks at the poster on the wall advertising that week’s sales, her eyes drifting over the words without reading anything. She bites her tongue and tries to let the whisper slide from her lips as quietly as she can.  
  
“Why do you care?”

Eve swears she can feel something ruffle the sleeve of her jacket as she reaches out for two bottles of discount wine. Villanelle moves into her vision and leans back against one of the displays, shaking her head.

“Because I’m your number one fan, Eve.”

“You’re not even real.”

“Really?”

Eve looks back to the display and there’s no one there except an old man rummaging among the bottles of whisky. She stares at the two bottles in her trolley and hovers over the merlot before grabbing it and shoving it back on the shelf.

\--

“Jesus, you can’t be here.”

Eve nearly spills her tea across her desk when she turns around and Villanelle is lounging in Kenny’s chair next to her.

“Shh, people will think you’re crazy if they hear you talking to a chair.”

Today, Villanelle is draped in a velvet ensemble peppered with little embroidered roses. It’s the gaudiest thing Eve has seen in weeks, like her grandmother’s couch vomited onto a three-piece suit. It’s so perfectly Villanelle. She snatches a file from the dwindling stack next to her and turns away from her guest.

“Maybe I am crazy.” She fills out the blank spaces for a few minutes in silence before realizing she’s miscounted and signed the wrong place four times. She shoves the paper away and spins her chair to face Villanelle, giving a quick glance into the hallway to make sure she’s still alone. (Sort of.)

“What do you want from me?” she hisses.

Villanelle leans forward, all pretense of jest falling from her face like ice melting against the sun.

“What do _you_ want from _me,_ Eve?”

She’s so close, and Eve thinks she’s never seen her face in this much detail before. Even lying together on the bed in Paris all those weeks ago, she’d never noticed the speckling of birthmarks on her right cheekbone, or the way her eyebrows arch differently on each side.

The words lay heavy in Eve’s throat, stuck there without a way to leave.

“What do you want?” Villanelle repeats.

Eve reaches out for the first time, to touch Villanelle, which is silly, because her fingertips only find air as they come forward.

Villanelle furrows her brows. Eve blinks and she’s gone.

\--

What does she want?

The right answer is that none of this had happened, that she could fly back in time to that meeting Saturday morning and not speak up when the pictures of a dead man are pushed across the table. Maybe a little later along, after she’s almost killed in a hospital and fired along with Bill. Maybe Carolyn would have never taken interest in her and she and Bill could have slogged along together at another mundane desk job.

No, she knows once she’d locked eyes with Villanelle in that grungy hospital bathroom, that was it.

Why?

She never could have gone on knowing Villanelle was still out there, not knowing Eve existed.

She wants to know if Villanelle is alive. Eve wants to know if she killed her. The uncertainty, the ghosts of Villanelle that have haunted her over the last month aren’t enough.

So what does she want? To be normal?

Is it possible to go on like nothing happened when you’ve laid across from someone you followed across a continent and dug a knife into? Is it possible be to “normal?”

It washes over her, like someone has cracked open a vault in her mind and let the answer spill over her in a cold waterfall. She sits in her lounge chair, legs curled up to her chest and it feels like she’s wide awake for the first time in weeks.

She doesn’t want Villanelle to be dead, because she doesn’t know how to exist without her.

\--

The bottle is only half empty, but Eve finds the taste too bitter to finish. She lays it down with a _thunk_ on the table next to the lounge chair. It’s been a month since Paris and Villanelle hasn’t appeared in three days. The wine has been hell to wean off of, ripped from her system like a child having a tantrum. Each day the headaches plague her no matter how many pills she takes to keep them at bay. It’s a tapeworm she has to pull at slowly, knowing ripping it out will only make things worse.

She is always tired, and Kenny and Elena have alternated bringing her double shots of espresso after lunch. Eve is eternally grateful for these gestures, and hopes her grim smiles are enough to assure them that _it’s okay, this is really just a phase._ No one has asked questions, as per usual. As long as she does her job, which she still does, and doesn’t disappear from the country again, they let her be. Or Carolyn had said as much that morning.

“You look like shit.”

Eve hasn’t startled at Villanelle’s voice since the workplace visit, but her head does still tilt up warily, pushing away the hair that’s fallen into her eyes.

This version of Villanelle takes her a moment to comprehend. She’s not wearing anything elaborate, nothing like her previous incarnations. She lays back against the pillows in a soft pink tee, and a boring, considering the wearer, pair of joggers. It’s jarring to see her so plain and unassuming. Eve notices bags under her eyes, mirroring her own. She looks haggard, freshly out of prison again, but what catches Eve’s attention the most is her hair.

“I’ve never seen your hair down.”

It’s flat, very straight, and the color of straw. It hangs limply.

Villanelle smirks. “Always surprising.” Her arms move up from her sides and the overhead light catches the glint of a blade half-hidden in her palm. “You’re not afraid?” She spins the blade around, catching it between her middle and pointer finger. “You don’t look very startled to find me in your bed.”

The meaning isn’t lost on Eve.

“You can’t hurt me.” Eve’s voice is steady, unmarred by the usual alcohol slurring her words into thick jelly.

“Oh?” Villanelle laughs, an odd trill Eve can’t wrap her head around. “You’re awfully confident for someone armed with a half a bottle of wine.” She sits up a little straighter and places the knife next to her on the bed, out of her grip but not out of reach. Her eyes slowly gaze around the bedroom, resting back on Eve when she’s surveyed it all.

There’s something different about this meeting. A wave of exhaustion rips over Eve, a wild undercurrent of frustration bubbling up on its heels. She feels her shoulders tense up. Villanelle breaks into a grin.

“This whole room stinks, by the way. You should really do something about that.”

“Fuck you.” Eve stands up too fast. She needs a second to steady herself, but keeps her eyes locked with Villanelle’s. “Honestly, fuck you for not dying in Paris.” Villanelle sits on the bed, unblinking, expression impossible to read.

“I’ve been spending the last month thinking I’ve been doing _crazy_ because of you.” Eve hoists the wine bottle to her lips and takes a too-big gulp, nearly choking. She has to take a moment to catch herself, sucking in a deep breath. “You just keep following me around, taunting me, waiting for what? For me to crack? To kill someone? To hurt myself? You just can’t leave me alone, can you?”

“Is that what you want?”

“Fuck you.”

And with blood pounding in her ears, she squeezes her palm around the bottle and lobs it at the bed. The wine escapes from the open mouth as it soars, arching through the air like a bastardized display of northern lights.

Villanelle’s mask drops, surprise dancing across her face before the bottle makes contact. She yelps, the projectile landing just below her breasts and splattering wine across her shirt and making a mess across the sheets.

Eve stares at Villanelle.

Villanelle stares at the stain spreading across her shirt.

“That was very stupid, Eve.” And before Eve can process what is happening, Villanelle has her pressed tightly against the wall, knife flush against the hollow of her throat.

Oh-

This.

This is _intimately_ real. Even feels her whole body prickle with ice, then heat as the sensations engulf her-- the rancid smell of wine, the warmth of the liquid heated by Villanelle’s skin pressed against her, the way the picture frame behind her digs into her spine. She hears Villanelle’s breathing first, deep and slow, punctured by what she realizes is her own breath, quick and shallow.

“You’re real,” Eve croaks, the tip of the knife digging dangerously into her skin as she tries to speak. She edges her chin up, trying to escape the pressure, but Villanelle presses the blade even harder. Eve’s breath hitches and she feels a sharp pain as the knife breaks skin.

“Yes, Eve, this is very real.”

Eve closes her eyes and feels tears prickling along the edges, the bead of blood on her neck welling up enough that it begins to drip down her throat. She swallows hard, and then laughs. It hurts, metal digging into the fresh wound, but she can’t help the sound that pools deep in her stomach and wrenches its way up and into the bedroom air. She’s _relieved._

Because it’s sick, and it’s wrong, but this is what she wants.


End file.
